the garden
by CeliaBlair24
Summary: Azula's thoughts have always been complex. Beneath the shade of her mother's frangipani tree, it has never been more apparent.


Mothers' garden is not the haven it had once been.

_Decrepit_ is the word that comes to mind, eyes on a tree reaching over the narrow woodblock fencing, the stagnant, shallow pool curdling into the overgrowth. A _waste_.

The long years since Mother's disappearance are at their most evident here, in the dried grass that brushes past her knees, and the rose-stems that have long stopped growing. Mothers' animals, the squabbling turtleducks and koi, her sanctuary birds, have long since been transferred, if not scattered back into the wilds beyond Caldera City.

_(And it does not weigh heavily on Azula the way it would have Zuko, perhaps, or Uncle for all that he loved anything other than Azula and father and the blood that tied them both to himself and the nephew he'd taken as _his_ and his _alone_). _

_Such bitterness, how unbecoming, Azula. _

There is a chill in the air here, where the locusts wring through dried blades of grass and dead flowers melt into the soil. Beyond her, the stagnant pool sloshes minutely with every fallen frangipani, capturing each petal with muddied ripples and the shadows of Agni's gift that would never again breach its surface.

It's a stark contrast to her toddlerhood and the short years after, when the garden had been clear and teeming with life. Father, she'd been assured, had made certain of that.

_"Follow me, Azula."_

There is no purpose that guides her journey here, and she spares little thought on the woman who walks alongside her, whose body fades into the grass with each step. Mothers' visits have lessened in the weeks since Zuko's departure, and the voices that have tormented her have only recently started to disperse as well. Today is one of rare disquiet, an in-between where the shadows were not quite imagined, and yet, were not entirely real.

_"Would you join me, Azula? I feel in need of an afternoon in the shade…" _

Near the bark of the frangipani tree is a round… _something_, the size of both her fists pressed together. Not a garden bench, like the one Mother had favored as Fire Princess and Wife to Ozai. Not the lacquered tablets Uncle commissioned as spirit-wards, whatever those were.

She nears it, for lack of anything else to do. She'd come here on a whim, following the glide of shadowed red silks and a fragrance time had not taken from her earlier memories of _Mom _and_ happiness_.

_Zuko_, she thinks, brushing her hand over the stone's surface. It was a recent move, the grass beneath its weight pressed into the dirt, fraying and damp and yellow by its stems. _Had to be him._

_Zuko. The fool. _

There is nothing carved into its smoothened surface to indicate a time or reason, but knowing her brother _– and she knew him quite well_ – she could figure out the why easily enough.

_You mourn, brother, but for who?_

She places the stone back into place, standing beside it as she watches the rippling surface of what was once Mothers' treasured garden pond. It's bare this way, without the animals that had once called it home. Without Zuko, who'd loved Mothers' turtleducks, and Mother who loved him in turn.

The sky has begun to darken with the beginnings of a storm, and Caldera City, though in silence, has begun preparations for the break from the summer heat. She can hear, almost, if she strains her ears enough, the sound of servants dashing through the Royal Family's inner compound, readying the abandoned long houses for the torrential, seasonal storms.

_I should not be here. _

It is a gasping thought, sudden and fleeting all the same. Similar instances have happened before, a younger, lone Azula, and the hidden passages, nooks and crannies of the splaying Fire Nation capital. Mother had looked for her then, and Zuko after her. In times of disturbance – though a disturbance she might be herself – it was wise not to leave her unattended for long.

_Father has no such compunction. _

And Uncle never cared for her. _Too much like Ozai_, he would say, when he thinks her back is turned. _Ruthless, manipulative…_ as if those traits were anything of concern. She was not much like Mother, and even less like Zuko. She was everything Uncle _despised_.

_Father cares for me. _

The boughs of the frangipani tree dip below the surface of the murky pond, gnarled, water-drenched leaves and bark dark even against the mire-like pond. The grass closest to the water is nearly as green as it had been when Mother had tended to it, growing past her hips and the weathered, vine-like sheathes of a flowering overgrowth.

The flowers, she had no name for, her memory of them lost to her by time. Blues, some of them, red-orange, the rest. She recognized the hibiscus though, only because of its fragile petals and Ty Lee, who had woven its stem into her hair once, during the long months they'd spent hunting the Avatar.

_"You're the prettiest, most beautiful girl I know, Azula!"_

The air is fragranced by a flower she cannot name. A splattering, vibrant orange-brown and white, its delicate leaves circling the root of the frangipani tree. As a child, Mother would be here, sitting beneath the shade of the frangipani's bough, running her fingers along the spine of this new, wild growing flower.

_"Come, Azula_." She would say, her whispered voice long forgotten. _"This is…"_ She would drone some name or another, too difficult to pronounce for Azula's child tongue and vaguely recognizable as an old Fire Nation dialect long since dead.

It was a taxonomy Azula held no interest in, even as a naïve little girl barely reaching Mothers' knee.

Zuko however… well, it was no wonder Mother loved him so closely, so endlessly. Odd, shy, quixotic big brother Zuko, child after her own heart.

A wind blows its way through the decrepit garden, the heady scent of the unnamed flower drifting along with it.

With barely a thought, Azula scorches through fragile petals and the twisting green of its leaves, the ground beneath darkened by her fire, cold-blue tinged white with a sudden, burning fury.

_"Take care of your brother, Azula. Be well."_

The sky has darkened considerably. Beyond the walls of this abandoned garden, sound is harried, a sea of whispered orders and harsh, rushing breath as the palace servants prepare for the storm on the horizon.

It is to be _especially disastrous_, or so a Fire Sage had claimed when called to report beneath Father's harsh judgement.

_"The spirits are angered." _He had said, and been promptly dispatched for his blatancy in the range of Father and his barely cooled temper. The scars of Fathers' battle with the Avatar marr his every visible line of skin. If he could stand, the injuries, Azula thinks, would be much more apparent.

_"Even weakened, you'd bow to his will, anyway." _

Azula takes a breath and scents the rain in the wind, the flowers she had burned on a whim. Uncle's voice intermingles with Mothers', with Zuko's, disjointed yet so oddly in sync. By now, she cannot tell whose words they were initially, only that they had been told to her once, a long time ago, when she had been old enough to understand them, but young enough still to not fully comprehend every connotation behind them.

_"Zuko told me all about it, how like the Fire Lord you are. He doesn't have to tell me more, that's enough of an explanation for me to know."_

_"You're evil, Azula! Don't even try to deny it!"_

Azula wonders if Zuko knew of the poisonous words spilled from the mouth of his companion. The hatred in her ocean-blue eyes, sinuous and deadly as Azula's own.

Perhaps he did, for although her brother could be accused of many things, he had never been _stupid_.

_"- You'll always be my sister."_

Words said so decisively, in a way even she could not claim as lie. His pale gold eyes in the firelight, sharpened by grief and determination, his hands on her shoulders, calloused by sword and three years spent sailing across the vastness of the world's seas, a distance stretching far beyond the eastern coast of the Earth Kingdom, to the edges of the explored, without ever touching the boundaries of home, gentle still.

_He could have stayed_, Azula thought.

_I would have let him stay. _

Would she have? Or would she have slain him like Father had asked her to, that short, endless night before her journey beyond the Capital's shores, cold and distant and remorseless.

_"He's served his purpose."_

Father's gaze, she would never forget.

_"Yes, Father." _She had said then, and smiled. _"Of course."_

The first droplet of rain sears through her skin and the fire in her chi.

It feels like a beginning.


End file.
